Revolutionary Conceptions: Women, Fertility, & Family Limitation in America, 1760–1820 (review)

Klepp’s Revolutionary Conceptions presents a strikingly new explanation for the causes of the so-called “fertility transition.” The well-documented, dramatic decline in the number of children born to individual woman began suddenly in North America during the mid-eighteenth century and has continued unabated (with only a brief interruption after World War II) until the present day. To take one example, whereas male delegates who gathered in 1776 at the Second Continental Congress came from families that had an average of 7.3 legitimate children, their own families would consist of an average of six children. By 1787, when another group met to write the U.S. Constitution, each representative’s completed family size had dropped to an average of only 4.8 children.

Yet Klepp’s study moves well beyond a focus on white elites. Although she draws from many existing demographic studies, Klepp herself generated an impressive amount of data to undergird her argument. One of the work’s many strengths is its scrupulous attention to class, regional, and religious variations in birthrates. Although the general trend in births was downward, religious minorities, free and enslaved African Americans, and white people of various classes experienced the decline in slightly different ways.

Statistics merely represent Klepp’s starting point. In contrast to previous studies, which focused primarily on the economic changes that may have contributed to the decision to limit childbearing, Klepp’s work concentrates on what fertility and family size meant to people at the time—most especially, to the women who gave birth to the children. The problem, however, is that most people in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries did not speak openly or directly about the female body, reproductive issues, or birth control. Nonetheless, through an exhaustive examination of an enormous variety of qualitative sources—including letters, diaries, medical treatises, almanacs, novels, and visual images—Klepp is able to reconstruct important shifts in how people thought about these sensitive issues.

Klepp’s most important claim is that despite its failure to grant women political rights, the American Revolution ushered in significant changes for women. For at least some women, the revolutionary experience enhanced their desire for greater independence and control over their own bodies. Women used a variety of methods, including delayed marriage, abstinence, extended periods of breast feeding and herbal remedies, to reduce the number of children that they bore. These changes were accompanied by shifts in private discourse, public intellectual debate, and visual iconography that de-emphasized women’s maternal fecundity and sanctioned other roles for women.

Thus, in Klepp’s view, women rather than men drove the fertility transition. Instead of male heads of household making hard-headed economic calculations about wages, land prices, and the need for fewer children, thousands of individual women decided to apply the fundamental principles of the Revolution to their own private situations and produce fewer children. In a fascinating transnational comparison that seems to confirm her point, Klepp notes that France, which experienced its own revolutionary tumult in the 1790s, experienced a decline in birthrates similar to that of the United States, whereas Britain, which avoided upheaval, did not.

Klepp’s work is a true example of interdisciplinary work at its best—rigorous yet imaginative, nuanced yet sweeping. Although specialists in particular disciplines might quibble with specific aspects of her interpretation, Revolutionary Conceptions offers a new paradigm for thinking about reproductive politics in an era long before that term had been coined.